Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Maclean: I did not focus heavily on rural crime in my speech today, not because I do not consider it important--I do--but because there is to be a National Farmers Union conference on rural crime next week, when a Home Office Minister will deliver a keynote speech setting out all aspects of our policy. I felt that I could not incorporate large chunks of that speech into today's speech because it would have made it inordinately long.
Mr. Leigh: Rural counties such as Lincolnshire will look forward to learning of what transpires during the next few weeks.
As I said earlier, I want to deal with the issue of rehabilitation, which was raised by the hon. and learned Member for Montgomery: it is the absolute key to our discussions. As long ago as 1895, the Gladstone committee said:
As the years passed, confidence in the treatment model, as it was called, declined. In 1979, a Government report from a committee of inquiry into the prison service said:
The report also states:
My purpose in speaking in the debate is my belief that we must begin to stress much more strongly the concept of rehabilitation in our prison service. That ties in with what my right hon. Friend has said today about his plans to deal with burglary, and I want to focus my remarks on that. I have thought for a long time that burglary is an absolute plague on our society. I credit the Government for the progress that they have made over the past year or two. When we knock on doors and canvass, the one aspect of Government to which people are warming is the Home Secretary's absolute determination to deal with that problem. They are glad that he has been left in his job and that he has been getting a grip of the problem.
I have argued for some time that we must do more about burglary and that there must be minimum deterrent sentences. The Government are now saying that someone who commits two or more burglaries will definitely go to prison. I do not think that that will reassure the public, who see burglary as the No. 1 plague in our society. It would have an enormous impact on society and burglars if people knew that if someone breaks into a private dwelling house, causing such appalling anguish and invading people's very privacy, he will go to prison. If the Government were to adopt such a policy, it would strike a tremendous chord with the public.
I have argued that point for some time, but I know that judges would be unwilling to accept it. They will say that the personal circumstances of offenders--for example, their ages--may differ. Few of us would take the risk, for instance, of drinking and driving because we know that if we did we would lose our licences. It is a clear and simple thing that the public understand. If the public understood that people who caused the anguish that burglary causes would end up in prison, it would have a major effect.
That is easy to say but I am not suggesting, before the hon. and learned Member for Montgomery is appalled by what I say, that we should simply put offenders, especially younger offenders, who account for most of the problem, into ancient Victorian institutions, throw away the key and forget about them. That is no solution.
For inspiration, I turn to the Home Office's "Directions to the Parole Board under section 32(6) of the Criminal Justice Act 1991", which deals with the release of mandatory life sentence prisoners. I do not suggest, of course, that there should be life sentences for burglary. We carefully consider how life sentence prisoners have performed in prison. The only way to deal with the matter is to recognise that there is a plague on society, that a relatively small number of people perpetrate these crimes, that we must at least make an effort to rehabilitate them in prison and that we must have confidence in ourselves that some form of custody can result in their rehabilitation.
The guidelines state:
The guidelines continue:
The Parole Board is entitled to consider
If people commit burglaries, they should be given a minimum deterrent sentence and told that their ability to leave prison and get back into society will depend on their behaviour in custody, the degree of remorse, the extent to which they have been willing to undertake training, their relationship with the probation service and their attitude and behaviour while in custody.
All those factors should be taken into account so that people who were contemplating committing burglary would know that they would receive a custodial sentence of some sort. It would not necessarily be in an ancient institution. There would be a great deal of flexibility about how such people were dealt with. The emphasis would be on deterrence and rehabilitation.
Unless we are prepared to overlook all the evidence that has been thrown at us in recent years that suggests that rehabilitation does not work, we will never solve the problem. One research study, to take one of many, declared:
Other authors have assembled a sizeable list of studies in which promising outcomes have been obtained and challenged the traditional view that rehabilitation does not work. For instance, one study said:
We have to have the courage both to carry on with the work of my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary and my right hon. Friend the Minister, in focusing on deterrence but, as the other side of coin, also to say that rehabilitation does and must have a role, especially for younger people. In a way, people could learn a lot by discarding a lot of recent studies and reading a book written over 100 years ago by Tolstoy, called "Resurrection". He deals with the criminal system of his time. Many of the arguments that he was talking about 100 years ago are still being debated today.
Mr. Gordon Prentice (Pendle):
The Minister paid tribute to our new chief constable in Lancashire, Pauline Clare. I want to talk later about spiralling crime in Lancashire.
First, I want to pick up what the Minister said about people having to be taught the difference between right and wrong. It was the same sort of stuff that was published in 1993 by the Home Office public relations unit in a pamphlet entitled "Government Policy on Law and Order". It states:
Society has been fashioned since 1979 in an unfair way. The gap between poorest and richest is greater than at any time since records began in 1886. There is deep poverty and alienation. There is far too much unemployment, which has deliberately been used by the Government as an instrument of economic policy. It was a "price well worth paying". We are now paying the price in rising crime, which is--I shall come to the statistics in a minute--linked directly to youth unemployment.
We heard from the hon. Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) about the sparsity factor, which has been introduced into the formula for police grant. The
police grant also contains a factor for young male unemployment. The money that goes from central Government to the police authorities is determined, in part, by the level of young male unemployment, so there is a link and we should not deny it.
Crime in my county of Lancashire has doubled since 1979, as it has doubled nationally. The risk of a household being burgled is one in 12 in Lancashire; in 1979 it was one in 43. The risk of a vehicle being broken into in Lancashire is one in seven; in 1979 it was one in 15. The most horrifying statistic of the lot is that the risk of a person being assaulted in Lancashire is one in 123; in 1979, it was one in 283. That is a deplorable record.
There has been a 55 per cent. increase in violence against the person since 1979. Robberies have quadrupled; there has been a 440 per cent. increase in robbery since 1979. Burglary, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle, has increased by 220 per cent. in Lancashire since 1979. There has even been an 89 per cent. increase in burglary since 1989. Theft from cars has increased by 296 per cent. since 1979. Criminal damage has increased by 206 per cent. in Lancashire since 1979. The number of offences in Lancashire has increased by 116 per cent since 1979. The crime rate has doubled in Lancashire: it has doubled nationally. We have had an explosion in crime.
That is the recent history. What has happened in the 1990s? In Lancashire, in 1990, there was a 20 per cent. increase in crime on the previous year; in 1991, there was a 14.2 per cent. increase on the 1990 figure; in 1992, a 9.5 per cent. increase on 1991 figure; and then it began to slow down. In 1993, there was a 1 per cent. increase. The latest fall is to be welcomed, but since 1979 there has been a cataclysmic rise in crime.
We are now promised 5,000 additional police officers over the next three years. We have been here before. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Mr. Michael) reminded me that, in 1972, the then Home Secretary pledged an additional 1,000 police officers. That never happened. The Prime Minister made exactly the same pledge before the 1992 general election. Nothing happened. We never did get an extra 1,000 police officers, so people are sceptical.
When the announcement was made about the additional money that would be made available to the police authorities, the new chief constable in Lancashire, Pauline Clare, implied that she would have to look at the small print. She said:
We know from the report of Her Majesty's chief inspector of constabulary for 1994-95, which was published only on 25 October, that there was a decline in police numbers from 128,045 in 1992 to 127,358 in 1994. Although big structural changes in the police service account for some of the changes, there has been a decline.
The county of Lancashire, and the police authority, has spent at or above its standard spending assessment for every year since 1990. It is spending at a level that the
Government think is appropriate to provide adequate policing in the county. The authorised police establishment before the changes of 1 April 1995 was 3,229. In no year since 1990 has the county force ever been up to establishment--never. In 1995, there were four fewer police officers in post in Lancashire than in 1990. There were 10 fewer police officers in post than the establishment in 1991; there were 14 fewer police officers in post in 1992; and, of course, in 1993 in Lancashire-- as with elsewhere in the country--there was a freeze on police recruitment. In Lancashire in 1995, we have one more police officer than we had last year. That is the context in which we have to examine the promise of 5,000 additional police officers over three years.
I received a letter from the Minister of State on 30 November--other hon. Members will have received a similar letter referring to the situation in their own county. The Minister wrote to me about the situation in Lancashire. He said:
"We start from the principle that prison treatment should have as its primary and concurrent objects deterrence and reformation."
That was adopted as official policy and it became the basis for all subsequent action in the prison service.
"The drive behind the original borstal ideas has fallen away and there is now no belief that longer sentences may be justified because they make actual reformative treatment more possible."
That sort of thinking has infected the whole debate.
"As confidence in the treatment model has waned in this way, no alternative philosophy commanding wide public support has taken its place. Members of the prison service of all grades from governor downwards, responsible for locking up their inmates and for providing regimes for them, have in consequence tended to lose faith in any positive justification for the inherently unpleasant tasks which are their job. Further, the wide intellectual debate which, as we have indicated, has been undermining the treatment model and simultaneously trying to provide a satisfactory alternative philosophy, has on occasions merely given fresh currency to the old ideas that imprisonment could be no more than punitive and deterrent."
"The Home Secretary takes the final decision on the release of mandatory life sentence prisoners . . . and that decision might be taken on grounds that go beyond the risk posed by the prisoner. The Home Secretary is also concerned with the wider political implications, including the effect on public confidence in the life sentence system which release may have."
"Before recommending release, the Parole Board should consider whether:
the lifer has shown by his performance in prison that he has made positive efforts to address his attitudes and behavioural problems and the extent to which progress has been made in doing so such that the risk that he will commit a further imprisonable offence after release is minimal."
"the offender's background . . . the nature and circumstances of the original offence . . . the sentencing judge's comments . . . attitude and behaviour in custody . . . degree of remorse and steps taken to achieve the treatment and training objectives set out in the life sentence plan . . . the lifer's relationship with the probation service and other outside support such as family and friends."
"rehabilitative methods tend, by and large, not to rehabilitate . . . research into the effectiveness of 'methods of intervention' . . . is a doomed endeavour."
That was by an author called Pitts writing in 1992.
"Equally damaging for the 'nothing works' position was a study by Thornton (1987) in which he reinvestigated a selection of the studies used by Lipton and co-workers (1975) to derive their original conclusions. Contrary to what had been claimed by Lipton and colleagues, a number of these projects had in fact described positive outcomes. Indeed, focusing on those studies that employed psychological therapy as the 'treatment' in controlled experimental designs, almost 50 per cent. of the results had demonstrated a positive advantage for therapeutic intervention."
"There is no point in politicians . . . calling for a return to old fashioned morality and respect for authority . . . it must be taught by example."
The Conservative Government could not publish anything like that today without risking gales of laughter.
"At first sight it would seem our allocation is above the current rate of inflation but we will have to take a much closer look at the Home Secretary's proposals in the light of our own policing plans."
The Government have been talking about more police for years, but the reality has rarely, if ever, caught up with the rhetoric.
"Under our proposals, your force's share of the additional funding in the first year will be £0.5m. This would be sufficient to recruit 28 police officers".
That was the headline--28 additional police officers for Lancashire.
Next Section
| Index | Home Page |